Disrupted: Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-Up Bubble

Disrupted: Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-Up Bubble

Dan Lyons was Technology Editor at Newsweek Magazine for years, a magazine writer at the top of his profession. One Friday morning he received a phone call: his job no longer existed. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was unemployed and facing financial oblivion. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital. They offered Dan a pile of stock options for the nebulous role of "marketing fellow." What could possibly go wrong? What follows is a hilarious and excoriating account of Dan's time at the start-up and a revealing window onto the dysfunctional culture that prevails in a world flush with cash and devoid of experience. Filled with stories of meaningless jargon, teddy bears at meetings, push-up competitions and all-night parties, this uproarious tale is also a trenchant analysis of the dysfunctional start-up world, a de facto conspiracy between those who start companies and those who fund them. It is a world where bad ideas are rewarded with hefty investments, where companies blow money lavishing perks on their post-collegiate workforces, and where everybody is trying to hang on just long enough to cash out with a fortune.

Reviews

Wildly entertaining... Disrupted explores the ways in which many technology companies have come to fool the public and themselves. Lyons has injected a dose of sanity into a world gone mad. -- Ashlee Vance, Sunday Times bestselling author of Elon Musk

Cooly observant... Splendidly weird... [Lyons] couldn't have written a tastier ending, even for HBO -- New York Times

Fun, compulsively readable and just might tell us something important about the hypocrisy and cult-like fervor inside today's technology giants. -- Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Dan Lyons goes deep inside a company that uses terms like 'world class marketing thought leaders' to show us how ridiculous, wasteful, and infantile tech start-ups like this can be. And best of all, Lyons does this with his trademark pejorative and hilarious tone. -- Nick Bilton, author of Hatching Twitter

Scathingly funny... Groovy young techies, you've been played. Tech startups are one gigantic millennial meat-grinder -- New York Post

Author description

Dan Lyons is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. He is currently a co-producer and writer for the HBO series Silicon Valley. Previously, Lyons was technology editor at Newsweek and the creator of the groundbreaking viral blog "The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs" (AKA "Fake Steve Jobs").